You might only think about the sweat on your hands when your arms are heavy and you’re trying to hold down your mom’s spaghetti before taking to the rap battle stage, but it turns out that watching perspiration pour from your fingers is far more fascinating than you or Eminem ever imagined, especially when watched in super up-close macro.

In this YouTube video from Timelapse Vision, they used a macro lens—allowing for far more detail than normal camera’s zoom—to show not only the epidermal ridges on our fingers and palms, the ones that make identifying us possible, but how the minute ducts of sweat glands that rest atop them excrete the tiny droplets of perspiration that leave behind the evidence that we were there.

When zoomed all the way in to take away the perspective that these images are from a human finger, they sort of look like a vast alien farmland where globs of lifeforms emerge from the ground like they were seeded and are now sprouting. We all know the clammy feeling when our hands start to sweat, but seeing just how many indistinguishable spots all of that moisture comes from makes the entire process feel far more fantastic than it does unpleasant (though it is a little weird to watch sweat actually come out of us).

It’s especially cool and enlightening when you see how this process helps forms a perfect fingerprint of the distinct ridges that are unique to each of us.

A sweaty hand might not be something we appreciate, not when we tend to only notice them in stressful moments, but that’s only because unlike a big spot of vomit on our sweaters many of the wonders of nature and our own bodies work in ways we can’t see.

How would you describe watching a fingertip sweat? Give us an up close look at your thoughts in the comments before.

Images: Timelapse Vision